Nov/Dec 2016
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A Letter From the Editor
Before I began working on this issue of Made Local Magazine, I didn’t know much about grasslands. After talking extensively with local grass farmers—that’s what farmer and writer Joel Salatin calls the people that are regenerating, by grazing herbivores holistically, our degraded American grasslands—I have a new appreciation for the green stuff under my feet.…
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Young Ones
Farm to Preschool benefits kids and farmers. In early September of this year, the students at Gold Ridge Preschool in Rohnert Park studied apples with their teacher, Andrea Pfeifer. They began at the beginning. Where do apples come from? “Some of the kids thought that apples come from the store,” says Pfeifer, the site supervisor at Gold…
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Betting on Herbivores
Regenerative managed grazing by local grass farmers might be one part of the solution to our climate change woes . Since she moved to California in 2013, Ariel Greenwood has regularly played tour guide to visitors from other parts of the country, showing off the natural wonders of Sonoma County. She doesn’t mind, but the…
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Coffee,Tea,or…Reishi?
Reishi Roast brings a coffee-like mushroom brew to a French press near you. A decade ago, herbalists Amy Charnay and Lily Mazzarella did an odd thing, at least to coffee purists: They added powdered reishi mushrooms straight into ground coffee to curb the energy and mood fluctuations brought on by caffeine . . . and…
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Adventures in Beer
Crooked Goat Brewing From Taylor Maid coffee to backyard honey, you can taste Sonoma County in Crooked Goat Brewing is something-for-everyone menu. “Local sourcing is our focus, as much as possible,” says brewmaster Will Erickson on a recent Tuesday morning, roughly a month after Crooked Goat Brewing slid open its roll-top doors to the public…
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Locavox
Stories from people who make our food system go. Gervacio Peña López | Landscaper, laborer, and board president of the Graton Day Labor Center Interview by Brooke Anderson of Climate Workers and Davin Cárdenas of the North Bay Organizing Project Brooke Anderson: Gervacio, I know you as a very committed leader in social movements here in the North…
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Curanderas Rising
Farming for Health empowers women in Roseland to cultivate plant medicine. Guadalupe Vasquez used to go to the doctor’s office three times a month. Vasquez, 35, battles diabetes as well as liver and kidney problems. Her pain was so severe, she once fainted in the emergency room and had to be put on a morphine drip.…
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In Coffee We Trust
Meet the Specialty and Small Batch Roasters that Keep Us Caffeinated I’ve long said that coffee is the last vice they’ll tear out of my cold, dead hands. I’ve tried to quit coffee in the past, caught up in some cleanse or other, only to realize that my first hot cup in the morning is…
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Locavortex
Foraged Flora The interior of SHED, the cafe, restaurant and marketplace in Healdsburg, plays a starring role in Foraged Flora, a stunning new celebration of wild plants and flowers by Bay Area floral designer Louesa Roebuck and Sarah Londsdale, a St. Helena resident and former editor at Remodelista. The coffee table photography book, out now…
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The End Bit
Legal Cannabis Farming Could Lead to Unique Farmpreneur Mashups. As Sonoma County regulators and policy makers work to figure out where and how to permit cannabis cultivation, a prime opportunity has arisen to examine the potential for alliances between existing fruit and vegetable farmers and cannabis growers. Vegetable farming is a notoriously difficult business. Cannabis…